Hunter Biden was among the audience at a Saturday night screening and Q&A of “From Russia With Lev,” which was followed by a Q&A with executive producer Rachel Maddow, director Billy Corben and subjects Lev and Svetlana Parnas. The MSNBC documentary, which aired Sept. 20, features a shocking scene in which Biden and Parnas come face-to-face after Parnas admitted to creating false and damaging allegations against Biden on behalf of then-President Donald Trump. While Biden did not speak publicly, he listened intently during the Q&A and spoke privately with members afterward. The screening, which took place at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica, was sponsored by the American Cinematheque.
The Ukrainian-American businessman singled out Biden because his father, Joe Biden, was seen by Trump as his biggest threat to reelection in 2020. Parnas worked with Rudy Giuliani and his actions led not only to his personal arrest on a range of charges — including campaign finance and wire fraud — but to Trump’s first impeachment.
“I had never looked at the human being before. I looked at him as a brand,” Parnas admitted to viewers. “I never, ever, ever sat down and considered what he was going through. What the Biden family was going through.” Parnas had to deeply apologize and clear Hunter Biden’s identity, saying, “It was my mission to always do the right thing.”
Parnas says he communicated his desire to apologize to a mutual friend, and Biden not only agreed to meet with him but also to allow the documentary crew to film him for the movie. Asked if he could have imagined such a meeting would happen, director Corben joked, “I’m still not sure.” He added, “If you had told me three and a half years ago that this documentary would end with Lev Parnas and Hunter Biden hugging, I wouldn’t have bet money on it.”
Paul Archuleta/MSNBC
Corben went on to detail the logistics of the secret meeting, which took place on July 7. “I barely put it on the calendar,” he revealed. After the date was locked in, a series of curveballs came their way, including Hunter Biden’s felony convictions tied to gun charges, the Biden-Trump debate, and Joe Biden dropping out of the presidential race. Each time, Corben noted, “I was like, ‘Well, clearly that’s not going to happen.’” Even on the day of the scheduled meeting, he woke up to a text message from Biden asking Corben to call him, and the director was certain the interview was falling through. “He was like, ‘No, I just need to confirm the time and place and everything,’” Corben recalled. “And we had an extremely interesting conversation about the habit, which I had in my fast family.”
To this day, Corben is astonished by what happened, stating, “Why Hunter Biden did that — I would leave that story for him to tell someday.”
Corben said, “For better or worse, Lev makes bizarre and eye-catching issues happen.” This is obvious in the film itself, which traces Parnas’s unusual and sometimes funny life as a Russian immigrant who finds himself deeply involved in a presidential scandal. Producer Alfred Spellman, who runs Rakontur corporate with Corben, has previously described Parnas as bringing a “Forrest Gumpian presence to the Trump-world jumble of extortion and fraud.”
The film also explores how Parnas found his ideology shifting and chose to speak out — starting with a bombshell interview with Maddow in January 2020. Parnas revealed that at the time, he had narrowed down the person to do the interview to two decisions — Maddow and CNN’s Anderson Cooper. He called his wife to inform her and, Parnas says, “She said, ‘There’s no choice — it’s actually Rachel.’”
Parnas admitted that it was ironic, since he had thought of Maddow as “the primary enemy” up until that point because of her unwavering protectiveness. However, he also acknowledged: “There are a lot of reporters, a lot of people who covered the Trump years. But there is no one like Rachel Maddow.”
Maddow, for her part, knew that Parnas was taking on a huge threat. “One of the many underappreciated things about that interview with Lev is that it was a really dangerous concept from his perspective, in the sense that he was under indictment at the time,” she said. “If you’re under indictment, that’s not a good time to do an interview.” In the interview, she was struck not only by how trustworthy and forthright Parnas was, but by the sheer volume of secret recordings he could produce. So when the concept of a film about Parnas was floated, she said, “I knew we would want any individual with incredible storytelling skills, kind of reading comprehension skills, to have the ability to take terabytes of data that Lev had on his phone and turn it into a compelling, verifiable story.”
It was Corben who first reached out to Parnas, shortly after the interview. The filmmaker had slid into Parnas’s DMs on X/Twitter, and it turned out that the latter was a fan of Corben’s previous work, along with “Cocaine Cowboys.” Maddow also felt that Corben and Spellman were the right pair because of their track record of “telling very, very serious stories in the funniest way possible.” She noted, “I really think one of the best ways to tell this story is to not leave out the absurdity, to not shy away from how hilarious and ridiculous it is, while at the same time being tremendously serious and horrific, and having really, really deep and serious implications for national security and for a lot of people’s lives.”
While the film has plenty of absurd humor and high stakes, there may also be a case for forgiveness. Maddow said, “There has been impunity for so many dangerous actors and the human beings who have been so badly chewed up, whether it’s Andrew McCabe in the FBI or Peter Struck or Stormy Daniels or Lev and Igor, or Hunter Biden — the human beings who have borne the brunt of this period have borne it on behalf of our nation. And part of defending our nation means defending them.”
She added: “That doesn’t mean they’re great people, and it doesn’t mean they haven’t been involved in some shady things. But the regret is real. The reality is the reality. And when people are being singled out and chewed up for political causes and for the development of this movement that’s trying to overturn our system of presidency, one of the many things we can do is not just hunker down and doom-scroll on our phones and fear about civil unrest, but recognize that there are real people right now who have had their lives ruined, for example, for all of us and to scare all of us, and we can stand up for those people.”
